A (master) piece of film history: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Tue, 21 Sep 1999 03:44:31 -0700 (PDT)

I should be ashamed, interrupting your Salinger-related posts with my off 
topic topics, but I can’t help myself. I tell myself it is correlated.

I’ve had one of those rare moments of movie-bliss. Thanks to Robert Altman’s 
masterpiece from 1971, McCabe and Mrs Miller.

The Swedish Film Institute shows films four times a day on two different 
cinemas in Stockholm (two of the best, I might add), and back in my days as 
a student, these shows were my wire into film history. For some reason, most 
people loose contact with the Film Institute Film Club when they start their 
off campus career. For some reason, American Pie or the last (or is it 
first) episode of Star Wars seems like an easier choice than keeping oneself 
updated on what is going on at the Film Club.

Last weekend, however, the fog went away from my eyes. I knew about the 
Robert Altman series the Club was showing, and I had marked the Film Club 
Chart with my brightest marker for 3 PM Saturday September 18 show.

McCABE & MRS MILLER is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. 
Melancholy without being sentimental, a poetic western with a photo that 
makes you cry. In the beginning, Warren Beatty (doing his best performance 
ever – I know it doesn’t say much, but here he is really good), wearing a 
gigantic fur coat, is riding trough a cold and rainy and muddy landscape, 
and we hear a few phrases from the “Stranger Song” (songs from Songs of 
Leonard Cohen fill the silence many times in this film). The photo is here 
as muddy as the landscape, everything is slightly out of focus and the 
colors are blurry. Yet it is perfectly beautiful.

The plot is simple. McCabe, a former hustler with superficial good manners, 
is coming to a mining town to be. 100ish men, mud, cold and numerous Chinese 
that doesn’t count. He is starting a new life. Here, among the filthy 
miners, he is a man of importance. He starts building a saloon. He buys a 
few prostitutes from a neighboring city. It is not especially sophisticated, 
but he is doing pretty well in his small way.

Entering Julie Christie. Mrs. Miller, like McCabe, comes from nowhere. She 
is, she says with her cockney accent the first time they meet, a whore, and 
she wants him to think big. She wants him to pay for a real whorehouse, a 
whorehouse with style, with sophisticated whores all the way from Seattle. 
McCabe is spellbound by Mrs Miller the second she enters (as are, I guess, 
we all) and before we know it, a prosperous whorehouse run by Mrs Miller 
rise in the midst of this dirty town.

For a while, everything is comedy. McCabe is the impotent master, more 
prosperous than ever but needed by no one. In love with the real runner of 
things, the Head Whore Mrs Miller (charging 5 dollars instead of the usual 
1.5), he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings. So, of course (this is a 
western, using the props lying around waiting to be used), he takes to the 
bottle.

Still, even before the mining company appears, the comedy is not left alone. 
The practical Mrs Miller, charging McCabe like the rest, locks the door and 
takes out her opium pipe. We can see her now and then peeking out from 
behind her two faces, the practical Queen of the whorehouse and the numb 
opium Princess, but she never gets free. Like McCabe she is trapped.

This goes on for a while, until two men from The Mining Company enters. They 
want to buy McCabe’s property. And they doesn’t take no for an answer. The 
former gambler over-plays his hand, with the intention of selling all along 
(he knows there is no real option), and misses his chance. Over a down to 
earth, simple private dinner conversation, the two negotiators decide the 
time for talking is over. The older one complains about getting such a 
shitty job after twenty years in the firm. The talkers leave the scene.

Only half of the running time of the film has passed, but we know it is game 
over. If it were a game of chess, we would shake hands and put the pieces on 
their starting positions. But no, here we must play till the end. Here is 
where the Sisyphus inside us becomes visible.

Suddenly, when there was some Hope in the pot, along with the sad beauty and 
the slow comedy, the hope of a better tomorrow, we know the tide has turned. 
There was a chance, but he (and thus, we) blew it. Slowly, slowly this 
becomes evident for McCabe. But his pride always gets in the way. Always a 
second too slow, he misses the chances he might have had.

This far, the photo has had that soft and dirty quality, but gradually it is 
changing and now, when we know something really bad is about to happen, it 
is sharpening. Like a filmed version of the life of Jesus, like a Greek 
tragedy, everything is moving to the catastrophe in slow motion. We know, as 
does the actors themselves, but still we hope. Still we go on with our daily 
life, still we pretend. Now and then the ice becomes too thin. Like in a 
scene where McCabe is sitting on the bed of Mrs Miller, trying to act like 
the Man, trying to say something that will make it better, but starts to 
cry.

Like all stories like these, relying on simple concepts close to the banal, 
it is all in how it is done. It is difficult to explain the work of the 
fantastic photo, the constant mumbling of the background townspeople, the 
scenes when civilization emerges from the muddy wilderness; the work it does 
in putting McCabe and Mrs Miller in the right frame, making them so lonely 
and wanting and hopeful and numb at the same time. Christie is amazing as 
Mrs Miller. She is great in Dr Zhivago and Don’t Look Now (note: the 
intense, explicit and so sad love scene with her and Donald Sutherland here 
is a true work of art), but this is her best performance ever.

I’ve generally thought Altman is at his best in dealing with “crowded 
movies” like Nashville and Short Cuts. Few have such an ability to form an 
entity with as many actors at the same time as he has. But I wonder if not 
this quality comes out just as good here. The people in the background seem 
really alive, even though every character in the movie except McCabe and Mrs 
Miller is as flat as a newly overrun cartoon.

After the movie, with the burden of the World on my shoulders, I came out to 
this beautiful autumn day. Two teenage girls, wearing the obligatory black 
clothes of the quality movie goer, was talking. “It was a bit long, wasn’t 
it?”. “Yeah. I lost interest after a while.”
We look at the same phenomena, still we never does. It is truly amazing. 
Never stop amazing.

I went home and my guest from Denmark, having bought Sushi for dinner, gave 
me a big hug. “You look like you need it”, she said. And believe me, I did.

/TLM

PS The second (and hence, last) showing of McCabe and Mrs Miller is 9 PM 
Thursday at the Film House of Stockholm. If you happen to be in the 
neighbouthood…

PPS Don’t even think about watching this on your VCR, if you don’t have the 
best of home movie set and can keep the outside world away. This film is a 
solipsistic experience, nothing to mix with the realities of home life 
(phone ringing, children crying, the result of too many glasses of soda).

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